Kite, Harvey

HARVEY KITE
HOW I CAME TO Y-12
I graduated Carson Newman College with a degree in chemistry, and in 1942 I went to work for Trojan Powder Company in Allentown Pennsylvania which was an explosives company and stayed there till the spring of uh ’43. Then I moved to Sandusky Ohio, and we started up a Penelec plant uh which some people said would never produce that the rate, at the design it had been designed for, and it turned out that uh my crew which I was training in the mix house exceeded the design the second week. The next two shifts did the same. The next day we did one batch more, and within two months we had that plant running at about 75 percent above design, and as a result of that we produced so much material that in the spring of 1944 I found myself without a job because they laid off and shut down, laid off a number of people and shut down two-thirds of the plant. And so I came back to Tennessee, and uh my chemistry professor referred me to Union Carbide and the Tennessee Eastman Corporation. Went to Tennessee Eastman Corporation, and they gave me a job at Y-12.
WHAT KINDS OF JOBS DID YOU DO AT Y-12?
I did a lot of things. I was involved in a lot of things. I started out as a junior chemist, and I wound up with—. I had a department, and I had three departments at one time working for—three of the uh development departments were reporting to me at one time because our division manager decided that he wanted to move John Googin from being a department head into being an advisor for, for everybody, anybody that came along and needed help, and he wanted to free John from administrative duties. He gave me, he gave me three departments. My department that I was running, operating at that time was the lithium program for development. I also had instituted a ceramics group and a plastics group into that department, and uh but that was turned over to Bill Tuse, and George Mara had the uranium and the carbon work, and Jim Shier was given the fundamentals organization which John Googin had been head of, and I was selected to take care of these three departments as my title was technical program director. As far as I know I’m the only person at Y-12 that ever held that title. But that was before I went to work directly for Jack.
The first person I worked for was Bill Wilcox for I’d say about two weeks maybe, and uh then I was, I became, I moved into the production and uh was working as uh as an operator, and within a short time I was a foreman. What we were doing is we were working on the recycle of the Beta material in building 9203. And then as time went along we moved to building 9206 over a period of, oh I don’t remember, that was probably a year or more later. I’ve forgotten now. And I became a foreman uh and thing went on from there.
WHAT DID YOU DO AT 9206?
We were, same thing, taking the Beta—the washings from the calutron and concentrating them and extracting the uranium out of the Beta calutrons, and uh that was the main thing we were doing initially. And we continued that until, for some period of time.
DID YOU SEE THE CALUTRONS
I was in them occasionally because we had to send someone over to pick up the concentrated material that we were going to recover.
HOW DID YOU TRANSPORT THE RECYLABLE BETA MATERIAL?
In a five gallon glass bottle contained in a stainless steel container that, that went all the way up to the top of the glass—five gallon glass bottle. And it was carried; it was carried over in a pickup truck.
I KNEW IT WAS URANIUM
Well, I knew it was uranium. In fact the matter, some of our uh operators that uh had a little bit of chemistry knew what it was too, and even though we didn’t call it that, but we sort of suspected that this was for a nuclear weapon. I even had one of my, one of my operators that had one year of chemistry in college and he says uh he says, “I know what we’re working with.” I said, “You don’t talk about, friend.” And uh it wasn’t a surprise to us exactly. We didn’t know when it might be used, but uh the day of the dropping of the bomb I went home that morning, or I was living at that time with my in-laws. My father and law had moved here, and he was working at K-25, and uh he uh his wife said something about an atomic bomb. And I said, “Shut up.” because I says, “You’re violating security.” And she says, “But they’ve dropped a bomb on Japan.” And I didn’t know it until she told me.
OTHER WORK IN 9206
We had some other work that we did. We did some work on uh, on uh the separating uh lithium isotopes, and I uh did a little work on the, on some oxide for the admiral trying to densify uranium oxide, heat it to high temperatures. I bought a high temperature furnace and installed, had it installed, and it was my job to try and see if I could, how dense I could pack that oxide for fuel for his submarines.
OTHER WORK AT Y-12
One of the things we did, we canned some slugs for ORNL, bonded slugs because they were using un-bonded slugs. I set up; I was responsible for setting up the facilities to do that, and start the operation. I had some help from Phineas Patton who did the engineering for us of the equipment, and we used. We bought some unique furnaces which were more, had a longer life than what they were ever using at Hanford. We canned a number of slugs for, I don’t remember, several hundred thousand, a few hundred thousand I think for the reactor at ORNL.
WORKING WITH HAFNIUM AND ZIRCONIUM EXTRACTION PROCESS
We worked also in separating hafnium and zirconium for the zirconium that they needed for the cladding of the uranium for the submarine. We worked on that job. Well, what we were doing was using the separation process which was solve an extraction to separate the hafnium from the zirconium because the hafnium would react, would serve as a quench for the reaction. And the zirconium would not, did not have the capture cross section for neutrons, but the hafnium did. So we had to remove it down to a low level of hafnium in the product. That was solve an extraction process.
Mostly I did lab work for some of that although most of that work had already been done, but uh I was working with equipment and uh generally doing some supervisory work in the process itself. Very successful. There were some people from an AEC in New York that seemed to have doubts that we were really separating. They came down and watched me take examples. One of my uh supervisors or one of our managers, I don’t remember who it was now, asked one of the men says, “did you think we were just making this material in the laboratory and not on a production basis?” He was a little upset that they had come down to watch us take sample of our process, at every stage of the process. I remember that very well.
Well the thing is it was, it was done almost, almost, well I shouldn’t say quite say overnight, but we had with uh John Strohecker who was perhaps the leading chemical engineer in the engineering division had taken a sheet of wrapping paper, grocery wrapping paper, brown paper, and had strung it out on the wall and had drawn his blue prints on that. They were not blue prints. He had just, just drawn in there what the flow diagrams should be and so forth. And the craftsman used that as a guide as to how to run the piping and so forth to build the extraction facilities and the precipitation facilities that were needed. And we happened to have enough big glass tanks and some uh rubber lined fielders, rather large fielders in the scrap yard that had come from some uh other place, and they were in our scrap yard that we were able to put that plant together pretty fast.
WHERE WAS THE EXTRACTION PROCESS LOCATED?
9206 at first, and then we moved the extraction to 9211 I guess it was.
JACK CASE AND THE CANNED SLUG PROCESS
Well, we went to Jack Case who was head of the machine shop to see that we got a, some steel sleeves or really a steel can that was open at the one end that we could use to protect the aluminum cans during the canning process because we had to dunk the slug and the can down under the molten metal that would bond the slug to the can on the inside. We didn’t want any of the bonding material on the outside of the can, and that was my contact with him.
JOHN MURRAY TOOK MY SECRETARY
Oh, John Murray was in interesting fellow. John uh, John was pretty nice to work with although I must say he took my secretary away from me. And he asked me what I thought of it. I says, “Well, John, I really don’t like it.” You talked to John like, you know, you’d tell him the truth. I had a good secretary, and he took, he took my secretary away from me. He borrowed her at first because he got rid of one of his secretaries, and he borrowed my secretary for a short period of time, and he went off on a vacation or something for a week or two, and when he came back he, he uh—well, let me, let me give you the detail on this. The day that John came back my wife needed the car so she uh she decided to take me to work that morning, and we had to get some gasoline, and my car was a pink and black Studebaker, and so it was, everybody in Oak Ridge knew who owned that car. Well, we drove down to a gas station right behind the pizza place in downtown Oak Ridge. Had to get some gasoline, and we turned after we got gasoline and started down towards the turnpike, and a car came up behind us, and he started blowing his horn. Helen says, “Who’s that? Who’s that blowing at us?” I said, I looked back and I said, “That’s John Murray. I think he wants to offer me a ride.” So he did. Wanted to offer me a ride to work, and he, when I got in the car he says, “Where’s Virginia?” I said, “Well, you said you just borrowed her for a short period of time,” and I said, “You weren’t here. And she was off for a few days,” I said, “When she came back she called me and asked me if she was supposed to stay up there.” And I said “Well, John just borrowed you for a short time.” And I said, “I think you better come back down to my office ‘cause I need you.” I didn’t have anybody left. So she did, but the next day was the day he came back, and so uh he says, “Can I pay here more that you’re paying her.” I says, “John, who are kidding? I presume you can.” So within two hours I had a phone call from my boss Lou Twitchel. He says, “John wants Virginia back permanently.”
YOU COULD TALK TO JOHN MURRAY OPENLY
Well you can talk; I don’t know why I’m saying this. You could talk to John open like that. I’ve known operator in the plant that would, that would tell John, “Leave me alone,” when he’d come and ask them. He’d come in at night and so forth, and ask them, start asking questions, and the guy would say, “John, I don’t have time to talk to you. I’m too buys. I’ve got to keep this plant running.” They would. That’s the way they, you know, they’re just honest with him. And he didn’t seem to resent it. You told him the truth.
MY RELATIONSHIP WITH JACK CASE
I had a pretty good relationship with Jack most of the time, nearly all of the time. Well, he was, he was a good supervisor, and he, he was fair to everyone, and uh I thought he was one of our better men. He certainly did real well for not having a degree which most of the people; a lot of the people that reported to him did have degrees. He was fairly easy guy to work with. He gave me a lot of tasks to do, gave me advise when I needed it, and uh gave me the freedom that I needed to do my job.
MY Y-12 PIN
I got this lapel pin in my belief because one of our security people in, during an audit of the plant for the general QA program making a statement to the fact that he would use force if he had to in a security situation. I was given a job to establish a QA program, which was not in line, not the same as the product QA program, and to have a representative from each division, and it would have to do with everything in the plant: the operations themselves, the guard department, the maintenance department, engineering, and we set up and established quality assurance programs within all the departments in addition to, which were separate from the product quality program. And I was a manager of that for a number of years, but it was, it was spun from his recommendation I guess, or maybe the, maybe the DOE’s recommendation that we have such a thing. They established, they established that they wanted something like that going on, and Jack asked me to do that. Well, I think I was in charge of that program, and I feel like that uh that probably the reason I received that although I wasn’t told was that from what I had understood Y-12 was the only plant in the Oak Ridge complex who’d ever received a superior rating for their plant QA program. Their lack of reluctance to be sort of tough on someone if they tried to violate security. Like maybe fatal. If I have to. He just said, “but.” That was it. That’s what I remember, and I think that’s what got; one of the reasons that they gave our plant a superior rating. I think that uh I didn’t have anything to do with the man saying that, but I think our people were just telling the truth.
WHY DID JACK USE THE LAPEL PIN?
To the best of my knowledge he used those to recognize outstanding performance by an individual in some particular manor which might be administration or it might be a technical improvement or something of that nature.
WHAT DID YOU THINK OF JACK CASE?
I thought a lot of him. I thought he was one of the most efficient, most easy to work with plant managers that we had.
WHAT WAS YOUR POSITION UNDER JACK CASE?
He says, “You work for the plant. Anybody that comes to you for help you try to help them if you can.” When I went to work for Jack Case he told me that my job was to help anybody in the plant that came to me for help as best as I could. In addition to that I had the responsibility for coordinating a production methods development program which consisted of each project in that program had both a production person follow in the program, responsible for it, and for where we were trying to develop new techniques or doing new material or something of that nature, and had a development advisor, and I was the coordinator for that work as well as being responsible for whoever came to me for help. But that was an assigned job.
WHAT KIND OF CHANGES HAVE YOU WITNESSED AT Y-12?
Well, the first thing that happened is we—there was a big drop in personnel. There were about twenty some thousand people I guess working in here when, about the time the bomb was dropped, the first one, and uh we went down to a few thousand. I don’t remember the exact numbers, but a lot of people left. Fortunately, I was retained. Well, there have been changes in the, in the types of work that the plant does. We took on different jobs during that time. As I say, we took on—one of the major things we took on was separating of hafnium and zirconium. We took on things like slug canning which was sort of a short term thing in a way, but then uh we uh became smaller as far as the total number of people employed. We had some real good people.
DO YOU REMEMBER ANYONE OF SIGNIFICANCE?
I remember some of the heads of the laboratories. I personally knew; I personally knew John Foster who is the head of the Livermore lab. I was uh personally acquainted with Max Roy who was head of W division at Los Alamos, the weapon design. He was, fact of the matter, he personally asked, called for me to come and talk to him. That’s right. He sent a letter in here, and it was lots for three or four days because the person that received it decided that every, every division manager needed to see it so he told his secretary to circulate it. And about three days later he got a phone call from Max saying, “I haven’t heard from Harvey yet. I had something to sell him.” And he knew what I had been working on, and he even ignored. When I got out there one of his engineers got angry because he was not invited to the meeting, and he says. He was real upset because Max didn’t invite him to the meeting with me, and uh but uh. I knew Max pretty well, and I knew, I knew his replace, Maxes replacement who was a fellow by the name of Agnue who later became the head of the laboratory. In fact, the day he was appointed head of the laboratory he came to Oak Ridge to visit ORNL, and I happened to meet him at the uh at the gate I guess it was. No, I met him over at the motel in Oak Ridge that afternoon cause I—the motel is down the street. I happened to be over there for some reason, and when he drove in. I knew Agnue also who had been Max’s assistant, and then I went out there at Los Alamos on a declassification program. We went there with a two week assignment. People from all over the country, and we finished the job in three days. And Harold Agnue through a party for us, or they had a party for us that night, Wednesday night. He got around to me and he says, “Harvey, what in the Hell are you doing here?” I says, “Well, I do a lot of things.” And he said, “Well, I wouldn’t expect you to be involved in this. Thank you for coming.” I went where I was asked to go. Do whatever I had to.

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HARVEY KITE
HOW I CAME TO Y-12
I graduated Carson Newman College with a degree in chemistry, and in 1942 I went to work for Trojan Powder Company in Allentown Pennsylvania which was an explosives company and stayed there till the spring of uh ’43. Then I moved to Sandusky Ohio, and we started up a Penelec plant uh which some people said would never produce that the rate, at the design it had been designed for, and it turned out that uh my crew which I was training in the mix house exceeded the design the second week. The next two shifts did the same. The next day we did one batch more, and within two months we had that plant running at about 75 percent above design, and as a result of that we produced so much material that in the spring of 1944 I found myself without a job because they laid off and shut down, laid off a number of people and shut down two-thirds of the plant. And so I came back to Tennessee, and uh my chemistry professor referred me to Union Carbide and the Tennessee Eastman Corporation. Went to Tennessee Eastman Corporation, and they gave me a job at Y-12.
WHAT KINDS OF JOBS DID YOU DO AT Y-12?
I did a lot of things. I was involved in a lot of things. I started out as a junior chemist, and I wound up with—. I had a department, and I had three departments at one time working for—three of the uh development departments were reporting to me at one time because our division manager decided that he wanted to move John Googin from being a department head into being an advisor for, for everybody, anybody that came along and needed help, and he wanted to free John from administrative duties. He gave me, he gave me three departments. My department that I was running, operating at that time was the lithium program for development. I also had instituted a ceramics group and a plastics group into that department, and uh but that was turned over to Bill Tuse, and George Mara had the uranium and the carbon work, and Jim Shier was given the fundamentals organization which John Googin had been head of, and I was selected to take care of these three departments as my title was technical program director. As far as I know I’m the only person at Y-12 that ever held that title. But that was before I went to work directly for Jack.
The first person I worked for was Bill Wilcox for I’d say about two weeks maybe, and uh then I was, I became, I moved into the production and uh was working as uh as an operator, and within a short time I was a foreman. What we were doing is we were working on the recycle of the Beta material in building 9203. And then as time went along we moved to building 9206 over a period of, oh I don’t remember, that was probably a year or more later. I’ve forgotten now. And I became a foreman uh and thing went on from there.
WHAT DID YOU DO AT 9206?
We were, same thing, taking the Beta—the washings from the calutron and concentrating them and extracting the uranium out of the Beta calutrons, and uh that was the main thing we were doing initially. And we continued that until, for some period of time.
DID YOU SEE THE CALUTRONS
I was in them occasionally because we had to send someone over to pick up the concentrated material that we were going to recover.
HOW DID YOU TRANSPORT THE RECYLABLE BETA MATERIAL?
In a five gallon glass bottle contained in a stainless steel container that, that went all the way up to the top of the glass—five gallon glass bottle. And it was carried; it was carried over in a pickup truck.
I KNEW IT WAS URANIUM
Well, I knew it was uranium. In fact the matter, some of our uh operators that uh had a little bit of chemistry knew what it was too, and even though we didn’t call it that, but we sort of suspected that this was for a nuclear weapon. I even had one of my, one of my operators that had one year of chemistry in college and he says uh he says, “I know what we’re working with.” I said, “You don’t talk about, friend.” And uh it wasn’t a surprise to us exactly. We didn’t know when it might be used, but uh the day of the dropping of the bomb I went home that morning, or I was living at that time with my in-laws. My father and law had moved here, and he was working at K-25, and uh he uh his wife said something about an atomic bomb. And I said, “Shut up.” because I says, “You’re violating security.” And she says, “But they’ve dropped a bomb on Japan.” And I didn’t know it until she told me.
OTHER WORK IN 9206
We had some other work that we did. We did some work on uh, on uh the separating uh lithium isotopes, and I uh did a little work on the, on some oxide for the admiral trying to densify uranium oxide, heat it to high temperatures. I bought a high temperature furnace and installed, had it installed, and it was my job to try and see if I could, how dense I could pack that oxide for fuel for his submarines.
OTHER WORK AT Y-12
One of the things we did, we canned some slugs for ORNL, bonded slugs because they were using un-bonded slugs. I set up; I was responsible for setting up the facilities to do that, and start the operation. I had some help from Phineas Patton who did the engineering for us of the equipment, and we used. We bought some unique furnaces which were more, had a longer life than what they were ever using at Hanford. We canned a number of slugs for, I don’t remember, several hundred thousand, a few hundred thousand I think for the reactor at ORNL.
WORKING WITH HAFNIUM AND ZIRCONIUM EXTRACTION PROCESS
We worked also in separating hafnium and zirconium for the zirconium that they needed for the cladding of the uranium for the submarine. We worked on that job. Well, what we were doing was using the separation process which was solve an extraction to separate the hafnium from the zirconium because the hafnium would react, would serve as a quench for the reaction. And the zirconium would not, did not have the capture cross section for neutrons, but the hafnium did. So we had to remove it down to a low level of hafnium in the product. That was solve an extraction process.
Mostly I did lab work for some of that although most of that work had already been done, but uh I was working with equipment and uh generally doing some supervisory work in the process itself. Very successful. There were some people from an AEC in New York that seemed to have doubts that we were really separating. They came down and watched me take examples. One of my uh supervisors or one of our managers, I don’t remember who it was now, asked one of the men says, “did you think we were just making this material in the laboratory and not on a production basis?” He was a little upset that they had come down to watch us take sample of our process, at every stage of the process. I remember that very well.
Well the thing is it was, it was done almost, almost, well I shouldn’t say quite say overnight, but we had with uh John Strohecker who was perhaps the leading chemical engineer in the engineering division had taken a sheet of wrapping paper, grocery wrapping paper, brown paper, and had strung it out on the wall and had drawn his blue prints on that. They were not blue prints. He had just, just drawn in there what the flow diagrams should be and so forth. And the craftsman used that as a guide as to how to run the piping and so forth to build the extraction facilities and the precipitation facilities that were needed. And we happened to have enough big glass tanks and some uh rubber lined fielders, rather large fielders in the scrap yard that had come from some uh other place, and they were in our scrap yard that we were able to put that plant together pretty fast.
WHERE WAS THE EXTRACTION PROCESS LOCATED?
9206 at first, and then we moved the extraction to 9211 I guess it was.
JACK CASE AND THE CANNED SLUG PROCESS
Well, we went to Jack Case who was head of the machine shop to see that we got a, some steel sleeves or really a steel can that was open at the one end that we could use to protect the aluminum cans during the canning process because we had to dunk the slug and the can down under the molten metal that would bond the slug to the can on the inside. We didn’t want any of the bonding material on the outside of the can, and that was my contact with him.
JOHN MURRAY TOOK MY SECRETARY
Oh, John Murray was in interesting fellow. John uh, John was pretty nice to work with although I must say he took my secretary away from me. And he asked me what I thought of it. I says, “Well, John, I really don’t like it.” You talked to John like, you know, you’d tell him the truth. I had a good secretary, and he took, he took my secretary away from me. He borrowed her at first because he got rid of one of his secretaries, and he borrowed my secretary for a short period of time, and he went off on a vacation or something for a week or two, and when he came back he, he uh—well, let me, let me give you the detail on this. The day that John came back my wife needed the car so she uh she decided to take me to work that morning, and we had to get some gasoline, and my car was a pink and black Studebaker, and so it was, everybody in Oak Ridge knew who owned that car. Well, we drove down to a gas station right behind the pizza place in downtown Oak Ridge. Had to get some gasoline, and we turned after we got gasoline and started down towards the turnpike, and a car came up behind us, and he started blowing his horn. Helen says, “Who’s that? Who’s that blowing at us?” I said, I looked back and I said, “That’s John Murray. I think he wants to offer me a ride.” So he did. Wanted to offer me a ride to work, and he, when I got in the car he says, “Where’s Virginia?” I said, “Well, you said you just borrowed her for a short period of time,” and I said, “You weren’t here. And she was off for a few days,” I said, “When she came back she called me and asked me if she was supposed to stay up there.” And I said “Well, John just borrowed you for a short time.” And I said, “I think you better come back down to my office ‘cause I need you.” I didn’t have anybody left. So she did, but the next day was the day he came back, and so uh he says, “Can I pay here more that you’re paying her.” I says, “John, who are kidding? I presume you can.” So within two hours I had a phone call from my boss Lou Twitchel. He says, “John wants Virginia back permanently.”
YOU COULD TALK TO JOHN MURRAY OPENLY
Well you can talk; I don’t know why I’m saying this. You could talk to John open like that. I’ve known operator in the plant that would, that would tell John, “Leave me alone,” when he’d come and ask them. He’d come in at night and so forth, and ask them, start asking questions, and the guy would say, “John, I don’t have time to talk to you. I’m too buys. I’ve got to keep this plant running.” They would. That’s the way they, you know, they’re just honest with him. And he didn’t seem to resent it. You told him the truth.
MY RELATIONSHIP WITH JACK CASE
I had a pretty good relationship with Jack most of the time, nearly all of the time. Well, he was, he was a good supervisor, and he, he was fair to everyone, and uh I thought he was one of our better men. He certainly did real well for not having a degree which most of the people; a lot of the people that reported to him did have degrees. He was fairly easy guy to work with. He gave me a lot of tasks to do, gave me advise when I needed it, and uh gave me the freedom that I needed to do my job.
MY Y-12 PIN
I got this lapel pin in my belief because one of our security people in, during an audit of the plant for the general QA program making a statement to the fact that he would use force if he had to in a security situation. I was given a job to establish a QA program, which was not in line, not the same as the product QA program, and to have a representative from each division, and it would have to do with everything in the plant: the operations themselves, the guard department, the maintenance department, engineering, and we set up and established quality assurance programs within all the departments in addition to, which were separate from the product quality program. And I was a manager of that for a number of years, but it was, it was spun from his recommendation I guess, or maybe the, maybe the DOE’s recommendation that we have such a thing. They established, they established that they wanted something like that going on, and Jack asked me to do that. Well, I think I was in charge of that program, and I feel like that uh that probably the reason I received that although I wasn’t told was that from what I had understood Y-12 was the only plant in the Oak Ridge complex who’d ever received a superior rating for their plant QA program. Their lack of reluctance to be sort of tough on someone if they tried to violate security. Like maybe fatal. If I have to. He just said, “but.” That was it. That’s what I remember, and I think that’s what got; one of the reasons that they gave our plant a superior rating. I think that uh I didn’t have anything to do with the man saying that, but I think our people were just telling the truth.
WHY DID JACK USE THE LAPEL PIN?
To the best of my knowledge he used those to recognize outstanding performance by an individual in some particular manor which might be administration or it might be a technical improvement or something of that nature.
WHAT DID YOU THINK OF JACK CASE?
I thought a lot of him. I thought he was one of the most efficient, most easy to work with plant managers that we had.
WHAT WAS YOUR POSITION UNDER JACK CASE?
He says, “You work for the plant. Anybody that comes to you for help you try to help them if you can.” When I went to work for Jack Case he told me that my job was to help anybody in the plant that came to me for help as best as I could. In addition to that I had the responsibility for coordinating a production methods development program which consisted of each project in that program had both a production person follow in the program, responsible for it, and for where we were trying to develop new techniques or doing new material or something of that nature, and had a development advisor, and I was the coordinator for that work as well as being responsible for whoever came to me for help. But that was an assigned job.
WHAT KIND OF CHANGES HAVE YOU WITNESSED AT Y-12?
Well, the first thing that happened is we—there was a big drop in personnel. There were about twenty some thousand people I guess working in here when, about the time the bomb was dropped, the first one, and uh we went down to a few thousand. I don’t remember the exact numbers, but a lot of people left. Fortunately, I was retained. Well, there have been changes in the, in the types of work that the plant does. We took on different jobs during that time. As I say, we took on—one of the major things we took on was separating of hafnium and zirconium. We took on things like slug canning which was sort of a short term thing in a way, but then uh we uh became smaller as far as the total number of people employed. We had some real good people.
DO YOU REMEMBER ANYONE OF SIGNIFICANCE?
I remember some of the heads of the laboratories. I personally knew; I personally knew John Foster who is the head of the Livermore lab. I was uh personally acquainted with Max Roy who was head of W division at Los Alamos, the weapon design. He was, fact of the matter, he personally asked, called for me to come and talk to him. That’s right. He sent a letter in here, and it was lots for three or four days because the person that received it decided that every, every division manager needed to see it so he told his secretary to circulate it. And about three days later he got a phone call from Max saying, “I haven’t heard from Harvey yet. I had something to sell him.” And he knew what I had been working on, and he even ignored. When I got out there one of his engineers got angry because he was not invited to the meeting, and he says. He was real upset because Max didn’t invite him to the meeting with me, and uh but uh. I knew Max pretty well, and I knew, I knew his replace, Maxes replacement who was a fellow by the name of Agnue who later became the head of the laboratory. In fact, the day he was appointed head of the laboratory he came to Oak Ridge to visit ORNL, and I happened to meet him at the uh at the gate I guess it was. No, I met him over at the motel in Oak Ridge that afternoon cause I—the motel is down the street. I happened to be over there for some reason, and when he drove in. I knew Agnue also who had been Max’s assistant, and then I went out there at Los Alamos on a declassification program. We went there with a two week assignment. People from all over the country, and we finished the job in three days. And Harold Agnue through a party for us, or they had a party for us that night, Wednesday night. He got around to me and he says, “Harvey, what in the Hell are you doing here?” I says, “Well, I do a lot of things.” And he said, “Well, I wouldn’t expect you to be involved in this. Thank you for coming.” I went where I was asked to go. Do whatever I had to.